OK, look, I’m human. In anticipation of watching the Sugar Bowl game Sunday — great show, wasn’t it? — I completely forgot about the scheduled debate among the Democratic candidates for president. I figured I’d make up for my omission by listening to the broadcast over the Internet on Monday.

Before I did, though, the morning’s headlines made me wonder if I’d missed a catfight. My newspaper, The Miami Herald, wrote this headline over a Washington Post wire story: “Dean’s rivals gang up on him in debate.” The crosstown Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel’s headline was: “Dean target of more fire from rivals.”

Was the most compelling news to emerge from this debate the Democratic challengers’ efforts to trip up the front-running former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean? The Bush administration tricked America into a war with a nation we now know wasn’t threatening our national security and wasn’t responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, at a cost of 482 American lives — and all the Democrats could do is play crabs-in-a-barrel and cut each other down?

What about the 43 million people lacking health insurance? The 2.3 million people who have lost jobs and still can’t find work in an economy that by some measures is “recovering”? The proposed energy policy crafted with the help of people the administration refuses to identify? What about …

I checked a bit further. The Post’s own headline was: “Dean absorbs most attacks from rivals.” The New York Times: “Rivals in debate take aim at Dean.” The Los Angeles Times: “Rivals hit Dean on all fronts in debate.”

I was dismayed as I put on my headphones and clicked through to a site — I used www.NPR.org — where I could listen to the entire broadcast. So many critical issues this nation faces, and here we can’t even count on a presidential campaign to produce …

A debate! Have mercy on my weary soul, it really was a spirited, well-run, informative debate, featuring specific questions and precise responses! I got my best accounting yet of the seven candidates who showed up (Gen. Wesley Clark and the Rev. Al Sharpton took a pass).

Yes, there were personal challenges, some jabs and parries, and a few testy remarks, but isn’t that what a good debate produces? How many times have the press and public whined about antiseptic debates that sound like a mind-numbing parade of 60-second political sound bites?

Indeed, the best element of Sunday’s debate was the phase where candidates were allowed to put a question directly to a fellow candidate — something that should be made mandatory in all political debates.

There was nothing surprising in the candidates taking shots at Dean, the current front-runner in the polls — nor did that qualify as headline news. I heard as many instances of the candidates affirming and piggybacking upon positions expressed by others as I heard “attacks” on Dean.

The news media do a disservice to consumers to cover this campaign as if it were a horse race — who’s ahead, who’s behind? — instead of detailing the positions, character and impact of the candidates.

We’ve faltered — certainly since Sept. 11, 2001, but even before — in putting the tough questions to the administration about the justifications for going to war, about questionable policies instituted out of fears of terrorism, about the effort to simultaneously burrow more deeply into citizens’ private lives while being more secretive about its own activities, and more.

By my reckoning, the media collectively are still cowering under allegations — some deserved, many not — of being liberally biased and unpatriotic. We’ve been overcompensating — trying to get people to “like” us — for long enough. It’s high time we got over it and did our jobs properly: Putting heat to the feet of those who have power and those who desire it. The coming election is far too important to the direction of this nation in the 21st century for us to be timid, lazy or uncurious about the people who want to represent us.

Robert Steinback is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His e-mail address is rsteinback@herald.com.