This year, pay close attention to the media during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. If you do, you might actually be convinced that the year ended on Christmas Day. Each year, during this time, they act as if the year has already ended. That's when they typically start running their year-end reviews and listing the top stories of the "year that was."
However, I believe they should wait until the year is actually over before running such retrospectives. If nothing else, they should wait for the sake of accuracy. It's quite possible that one or more of the year's top stories could occur between December 26 and 31. The "big one" could hit California, another war could get started, a major world leader could be assassinated, etc.
Wouldn't stories like those be among the top stories of any given year? I should think so. When such events happen in the last week of a year, after a media outlet has already announced its top stories of that year, how does it handle that situation? Does it tack that story on to the top stories of the following year (which would be factually inaccurate) or modify the current year's list of top stories and recant the list it originally aired? That's a dilemma the media should never create for itself.
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