Liguori, who has children ages 11 and 14, said he knows "CSI" is not appropriate for most kids. But he said it's up to parents to monitor and decide what their children should watch.

"All of the media executives are going to pay a lot more attention to what's making them money," said David Walsh, head of the National Institute on Media and the Family. "Their job performance is not going to include 'What do parents think of what you're doing?' Their job performance is going to be based on 'How much money did you make?' "

Fifteen years ago when he first started talking about the influence of media violence on young people, Walsh said, he had to convince parents it was an issue worth being concerned about. Now he said they need no convincing.

Still, it's an increasingly lonely effort.

The prime-time body count was compiled, after a request from The Associated Press, by the Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that keeps tapes of network programming.

Yet the PTC, which frequently files complaints with the Federal Communications Commission about network fare, admits that its focus has primarily been on sex, not gore. One reason is that there's no government agency concerned with these issues, said Melissa Caldwell, the PTC's research director.

The council prefers to steer advertisers away from programming it disapproves of but hasn't started any campaign against a broadcaster for violent content this season. The closest it came was a protest this month about an episode of CBS's "NCIS" where a stripper had her throat cut, primarily because it was shown before 9 p.m.

Americans "seem to have more of a taste for violence, unfortunately, so it's a little bit more difficult to get people worked up over it," Caldwell said.

Both the National Coalition on Television Violence and the National Alliance for Non-Violent Programming were active in the 1990s. The impact of blood 'n' guts in the media was a big issue then. But now each organization is largely defunct, their funds dried up.

The current body count hasn't gone unnoticed by former leaders of these groups, although one noted an interesting twist brought on by the popularity of forensics shows.

"One of our arguments used to be that they showed the violence without the effects," said Mary Ann Banta, former board member of the National Coalition on Television Violence. "Now they are showing the effects without the violence."

That's still upsetting, she said.

How much televised gore affects people has been the subject of countless studies but hasn't — perhaps can't — be answered definitively.

"The most difficult issue here is desensitization," said Whitney Vanderwerff, former head of the National Alliance for Non-Violent Programming. "People have become so accustomed to this that it no longer registers.

"But," she maintains, "it does to kids."

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On the Net: www.mediafamily.org www.parentstv.org