So the basic idea is: what would happen if news broadcasts were forced to cite everything they said, like we do in the academic world? Extensions to this idea: footnotes

The setup is as follows:

News anchor is behind the desk, you can see the set crew (cameraman, director, teleprompter) all there. The anchor says something like "Welcome to National Nine News, broadcast to you live every night at 6 o-clock. um... what's that?". The director calls for the show to be cut to a commercial. Turns out there's a '[1]' next to 'six o-clock' on the teleprompter, which denotes a citation (the government has deemed that this is necesarry to ensure that news broadcasts are honest or something like that). For this, the anchor needs to look at the citations teleprompter (which is, of course, in a completely different direction to the first one and the camera). After this, anchor sees a subscript '1' near something, and then we add a footnotes teleprompter, and then possibly a footnotes within citations teleprompter. Possibly we then have fun with sources - things like playschool come to mind.

This would be a cool sketch to be able to have a lot of layers. For instance, you can put on the screen the name/product shot of the commercial currently running and how long its got to go, and then the director needs to signal for more commericals or get out of the way in time. You can have the make-up person who comes every time and does the anchor's face again, but then every time as they're running away, the anchor says 'wait! you missed a spot!' and they have to come running back to get it (and one time they're still doing it when they go back on air). I think that illustrating the complexity of the broadcast and thus the chaos that ensues when the citations are introduced would be a lot of fun.

Oh, and giving the anchor a completely different on-screen and off-screen voice would be nice too.