Bill O’Reilly was less than gracious tonight as he addressed calls to honor his pledge to “apologize for being an idiot” if the ObamaCare mandate were to be upheld by the Supreme Court as a tax. In the wake of the Supreme Court doing exactly that last week, let’s just say that O’Reilly did not exactly take his own medicine like a man. In fact, he behaved so childishly, he got a lecture from Bernard Goldberg to apologize, "smile and move on."

O’Reilly introduced the segment by saying, “The far-left smear site, Media Matters, making a big deal out of this.” He then played the now-infamous clip of his pledge.

“I’m not really sorry,” he said. “But I’m a man of my word so I apologize for not factoring in the John Roberts situation. Truthfully, I never in a million years thought the Chief Justice would go beyond the scope of the commerce clause debate and into taxation. I may be an idiot for not considering that.”

Then, it was time for Fox News’ media critic, Bernie Goldberg.

O’Reilly began the interview with, “So, some far-left kooks on MSNBC running with that clip, also our pal Howard Kurtz and CNN – who once again does the bidding of Media Matters. And you say?”

Goldberg’s surprising answer:

I say that you may be many things, Bill, but naïve isn’t one of them. You should have seen this coming. You’re a big name in the culture on a big network and you made a big, loud prediction. So of course they were going to go after you. But not for journalistic reasons. This is trivial, as far as journalism is concerned. You made a prediction and you got it wrong. That’s no big deal. Everybody made a prediction. They’re going after you for entertainment reasons…

You gave them the ammunition. It comes with the territory. My advice is, accept it, smile and move on.

O’Reilly said he had. But then he immediately moved on to attack Howard Kurtz – after a swipe at MSNBC and the left-wing bloggers (“we don’t really care what they say”). “But Kurtz does the bidding of Media Matters… but this disturbs me a little bit... He empowers them,” O'Reilly said. He wasn't smiling.

“I think you’re being too sensitive,” Goldberg replied.

Then the conversation shifted to comparing Media Matters to the Media Research Center. You can probably guess which one got the favorable rating. “The difference is the Media Research Center does numbers,” O’Reilly said. “The Media Matters people, they want to hurt you personally.”

If O’Reilly was referring to a little embarrassment over his faulty health care prediction as an example of the kind of “personal hurt” Media Matters tries to create, it’s hard to feel too sorry for him. Because this is a guy who has deliberately caused a world of hurt for lots of people – not the least of whom was the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller - assassinated after years of being demonized by O’Reilly as “Dr. Tiller the baby killer.” Plus, there was Professor Ward Churchill , who lost his job, and Think Progress’ Amanda Terkel (now with Huffington Post), who was stalked and ambushed by an O’Reilly producer, to name two more. A little hurt pride seems minor in comparison, don’t you think?

But as far as Media Matters not using numbers – Bill, you’re wrong again. Media Matters crunches lots of numbers: In April, they did a study of climate change coverage, in January, a study of the XL Pipeline coverage, and their April post correcting Hannity’s misinformation about insurers’ discrimination against women has enough numbers to make anyone’s eyes glaze over.

So you might want to be a little more careful about what you say about Media Matters, Bill. Or you might wind up being forced to apologize to them next.