As the Obama administration conducted an Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review this month, the news media did too, and the coverage came peppered with question marks. The same week that ABC News scheduled a series of segments titled 'Afghanistan: Can We Win?,' Katie Couric of the 'CBS Evening News' devoted six minutes to a special report, 'Can This War Be Won?' A recent headline atop New York magazine repeated a question asked by dozens of opinion writers this year -- and last year, and the year before -- 'Why Are We in Afghanistan?' The questions reflect the complex nature of the Afghan war, and of the news coverage. The grueling war there, where a day rarely goes by without an allied casualty, is like a faint heartbeat, accounting for just 4 percent of the nation's news coverage in major outlets through early December, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an arm of the Pew Research Center. That is down slightly from last year, when the war accounted for 5 percent. 'It's never passed the threshold to be a big story week in, week out for Americans,' said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the project. The low levels of coverage reflect the limitations on news-gathering budgets and, some say, low levels of interest in the war among the public. About a quarter of Americans follow news about Afghanistan closely, according to recent surveys by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. As President Barack Obama signaled last year that he would wind down the war in Iraq and refocus attention on Afghanistan, television networks largely withdrew from Baghdad, and moved staff to the Afghan capital, Kabul, though not on an equivalent basis. Newspapers and wire services also bulked up in Kabul. American networks each generally have one correspondent in Kabul at all times, sometimes working on a freelance basis. This year, American economic concerns, the midterm elections and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico each earned more than twice as much news media attention as the war, according to the Pew assessment, which comes from a weekly study of the nation's major newspapers, radio and television newscasts, and major news websites. Four or 5 percent 'may be the baseline, at least for now, no matter what the strategic stakes are, or even as U.S. involvement ratchets up,' Jurkowitz said. This year, Jurkowitz estimated, roughly half of the coverage of Afghanistan actually emanated from the war zone. That suggests that 'without a major Washington policy debate or strategy review ongoing, that Afghanistan remains a story that gets modest coverage,' he said. 