I see what you mean. Today these doomsday predictions, the people who make them, they're kind of forgotten once the event they predict does not happen. Like those cults that shut themselves in caves and say the world will end at 3pm. At 3pm the world doesn't end and a day later nobody remembers it was ever predicted. Kinda like the millennium bug. Remember that? The whole world was going to explode. Didn't happen, then everybody forgot.

Newspaper columnists are different. They give their opinions and are careful never to make a solid statement. The tricks they use are as follows. They'll put a headline in brackets, such as: "Videogames DO cause violence." The brackets indicate that the newspaper is merely quoting the words of someone else, so they are never liable for that statement. Other times they'll say: "If true." Again this is shielding themselves from any liability if the opposite turns out to be the case and the newspaper is wrong, at which point they conveniently forget they ever wrote it and never mention it again. Newspapers are just liars pushing a certain agenda by lying and distorting facts. You'd have to be an idiot in the first place to believe anything they write.

But astrologers make actual statements. In the case of the ancient world they would perform some strange (strange to us, anyway) action, like killing an animal and cutting out its liver, or releasing pigeons, then make a statement based on the results.