And not without reason, either. CNN’s staging of the first Democratic presidential debate deserves some praise for its moderator, Anderson Cooper, who did a good job of holding all of the candidates’ feet to the fire. Cooper started the night with probing questions and kept up the pressure throughout the 90 minutes of debate. The staging and the dramatic set-up, especially in the long wind-up to the debate, was as pretentious and phony as it gets, which ended up being made clear by the actual drama within the debate itself. Memo to networks: skip the tedious WWE narration and get to business.

However, the decision to feature almost no one but Cooper seemed odd when CNN had promoted its panel — Dana Bash, Juan Carlos Lopez from its CNN en Español channel, and Don Lemon. Networks choose their anchors to moderate debates to promote them, of course, but ignoring their other panelists only makes them look superfluous … or worse.

The Washington Post’s Janelle Ross focuses on the worse:

For all the talk about inequality and inclusion from the Democratic presidential candidates, for all the major national news this year about the ways that American life remains shaped by race, for all the reporting that’s been done on the rapidly changing demographics of the United States, the network airing the first Democratic presidential primary debate Tuesday thought it wise to allow an experienced Latino reporter to ask a small series of questions about immigration, and a black reporter to introduce a single inquiry from Facebook about Black Lives Matter. And that’s all we heard from them until nearly two hours into the debate. …

Now, the primary debates are coordinated by the parties and the networks. The debates during the general election are controlled by the presidential debate commission. Both have some real explaining to do. So far, we’ve heard from the debate commission that they blame the television networks for failing to recruit and develop a sufficient talent pool of minority journalists with the skills and experience to moderate a debate. That claim is, again, pretty darn debatable considering only Tuesday night’s examples.

That is not, of course, to say that there was no place or role for Cooper or a lead moderator. It is to say that there was something very wrong with the incredibly limited ones proscribed for Lopez and Lemon.

Ross wasn’t the only one who noticed this in real time. A number of people on Twitter wondered why Cooper suddenly threw it to Lemon on the topic of race, and Lopez on immigration. Ross notes that neither got asked to contribute before those questions at all, and that the only other opportunities they got to ask questions didn’t take place until the final 25 minutes of the debate. Whether CNN intended it or not, it looked to many observers that the network had them on hand to merely address the issues that pertained to their own ethnicity. And even then, CNN allowed them almost no time for follow-ups on those topics; Lopez did get one extra question in on immigration.

Of course, it should be noted that CNN’s panel was more diverse than the set of candidates fielding those questions. It should also be noted that Bash ended up as a footnote too, just as she did in the Republican debate at the Reagan library in Simi Valley. Some of this is a lack of commitment to the panel format by CNN. But it is worth noting that Hugh Hewitt got more questions in the GOP debate than Lemon and Lopez combined got last night, especially early on in the debate.

For future debates, networks should either fully commit to the panel format or jettison it altogether. And if you’re bringing in reporters as a commitment to diversity as a way to promote them, making it look as though their only expertise is on their own ethnicity is counterproductive, to say the least.