WASHINGTON-- With President Barack Obama seemingly poised to deploy thousands more troops to Afghanistan ramping up the war there, the US media faces a dilemma on how to cover the conflict with dwindling resources.

As the most crippling recession in decades bites into their budgets, US news outlets are caught between having to watch their finances and the need to cover a bloody conflict, once called the "forgotten war," into which America has poured so many resources.

"When you put people in harm's way, you have to make sure you keep them safe. That's an extraordinarily expensive proposition," CBS Evening News executive producer Rick Kaplan told AFP.

"As it gets more expensive, you have to dial back."

For some news organizations, a more nimble operation reflects a deliberate choice to get closer to the population in the largely rural country, a far cry from the reinforced compounds some organizations maintained in Iraq.

"We're operating differently, but it's not so much a cost issue, it's more of a philosophical choice to work in a more low-profile way," said Los Angeles Times foreign editor Bruce Wallace.

Coverage has steadily increased, from just two percent of news programs in the first half of this year to seven percent since July 1 -- making it the number three story overall -- according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

The "real trigger" was the fraud-marred first round of the Afghan elections in August, said PEJ executive director Mark Jurkowitz.

Major news organizations are now regularly dispatching their star reporters to Afghanistan, and many have migrated directly from Iraq.

But for years, Afghanistan simmered on the back burner, contributing to a "big gap" between the public's perception of the war as a distant, low-level conflict and the true unfolding situation, said National Public Radio (NPR) host Renee Montagne, who spent a month there in the summer.

"People can make their own choice about whether or not a war should be fought, but they should be able to make it based on information," she told AFP.

"The low level of coverage was very noticeable... We were fighting a war and it was the eighth year going into the ninth year and we were rarely there."

Despite a spike of violence in 2008, Afghanistan accounted for just one percent of media coverage, according to PEJ's monitoring of a sample of 55 print, online, television and radio outlets.

"We had conflicts in Iraq, we had conflicts in Afghanistan, a presidential race, the economy tanking," said ABC News senior foreign affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz, who has traveled a dozen times to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and nearly 20 times to Iraq.

Kaplan from CBS and other news executives acknowledged it was challenging to maintain public interest in a war that has now dragged on for over eight years.

CBS Evening News dedicated three of its 30-minute newscasts for the week beginning October 5 to the war to "have the country sit down and in a very detailed way analyze every aspect of the history of our relationship with Afghanistan," Kaplan said.

But his show's Nielsen ratings dropped steadily, from 4.3 percent of household viewers on the first day to 3.4 percent on the third day.

And reporters and their bosses face huge challenges in Afghanistan's rugged and perilous environment.

Seventeen journalists have been killed in the war so far, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

They also run the risk of kidnapping. David Rohde of The New York Times was held by the Taliban for seven months until June. His colleague Stephen Farrell was kidnapped for four days in September until a raid that freed him but killed his translator, Sultan Munadi.

Others have had narrow escapes. NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was supposed to be on one of the three helicopters that crashed in Afghanistan on October 26, killing 14 Americans in two separate incidents.

"How do you move your reporters? There is no safe way to do it," stressed Kaplan. "It's a much more difficult story to cover than Iraq."

The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post now have correspondents based in Kabul and Islamabad, and The New York Times has had a reporter in Afghanistan since November 2001.

NPR opened its Kabul bureau in 2007 and launched its Islamabad bureau in April. CNN, NBC and the Fox News Channel all have a full-time correspondent in Kabul, where CBS has a digital journalist and ABC maintains a full-time producer.

But despite the new media frenzy over a war that has largely been fought out of the public view, much of the focus has been on the domestic US policy debate.

"It certainly is easier to put a reporter in Washington, DC than in Kabul," said the Pew Center's Jurkowitz.