The so-called bright future depresses me.

Honest, this is the prospect of coming electronic marvels that a publisher at a newspaper in Northwest Arkansas unveiled to his readers the other day:

"At some point technology might allow us to provide each of our readers with a customized product. We will be able to send one person an editorial backing one position and the next person will receive one that is just the opposite. . . ."

Ho boy. Ain't technology grand?

Consider the possibilities for an up-to-date editorial page. Tell us your opinion about some particular issue, and we in turn will tell you yours. Call it customized currying.

Think of all the time and energy you'll save on thought. No more changes of heart or mind, no more angry reactions to get the blood pressure up first thing in the morning, no more thoughtful response or amused skepticism or agreement-with-reservations.

Everybody's opinion will be confirmed, even buttressed, by everybody's infinitely accommodating daily echo.

Soon a newspaper can agree with every single one of its subscribers, and need not offend a single one ever again. Indeed, the bubble popularity is almost within our grasp, my fellow yes-men. We were never so close to the golden Grail of editorial writing.

Those who think the object of newspapering is an ever-expanding, utterly tranquilized readership will be enthusiastic. Me, I haven't read anything so utterly depressing in years.

What worries me most, having read some bland editorials in my time, is this: Once such a technological marvel is introduced, how will the readers at some papers be able to tell the difference?

Isn't this going a bit far even in the Age of Clinton?

Naaah. I can hardly wait to agree with every editorial I see in print. Who wants to be challenged, outraged, enlightened, or insulted?

Come futureworld, all the opinion we read will be a carbon copy of our own. Reading the editorial column will be so assuring, so supportive, so . . . familiar. A little boring, maybe, but never surprising. It'll be like reading one's own mind, even if it may close after a while.

As for a newspaper's own opinion, its own ideas, its own integrity and character: all that quaint old baggage can soon be jettisoned thanks to the wonders of computerized science. Maybe even the inky wretches who write columns can please everybody all the time. Wouldn't you agree?

Randy Cape, the publisher at the Northwest Arkansas Times in Fayetteville, has done more than unveil the great, technologically enhanced future awaiting spineless journalism. He has provided the perfect occasion to reprint a small classic of American commentary. E.B. White came across this little item in 1948 in Editor & Publisher:

"San Francisco - Public opinion polls are scientific tools which should be used by newspapers to prevent editorial errors of judgment, Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Division of Journalism at Stanford University, believes.

"'A publisher is smart to take a poll before he gets his neck out too far,' he said. 'Polls provide a better idea of acceptance of newspaper policies.'"

In technologically challenged 1948, journalism had not yet advanced to the point where a publisher or professor could envision a separate editorial to please every taste. But then, as now, polls were the favorite tool of those out to echo public opinion rather than express any ideas of their own.

E.B. White's reaction to this prospect was simple. He was appalled.

But he was not at a loss for words. On the contrary, in the January 31, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, he wrote the definitive response to every variety of the suggestion that the essential function of editorial opinion is to play it safe. And it took him only one paragraph.

"We have read this statement half a dozen times," White wrote of the professor's suggestion, "probably in the faint hope that Editor & Publisher might be misquoting Dr. Bush or that we had failed to understand him. But there it stands - a clear guide to the life of expediency, a simple formula for journalism by acceptance, a short essay on how to run a newspaper by saying only the words the public wants to hear said.

"It seems to us that Dr. Bush hands his students not a sword but a weather vane. Under such conditions, the fourth estate becomes a mere parody of the human intelligence, and best be turned over to bright birds with split tongues or to monkeys who can make change."

I wouldn't add another word.

NCEW member Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. This article originally appeared as a syndicated column.