Abstract
Spectropolarimetry of broad absorption line quasars (BALQSOs) has demonstrated that the geometry of the absorbing material is far from spherically symmetric. Calculations of accretion disk spectra suggest that the intrinsic radiation pattern of quasars is also anisotropic. Because the quasar count distribution is very steep, if the orientations of these two anisotropies are correlated, optical flux-limited samples would be very strongly biased with respect to the discovery of BALQSOs. In particular, currently favored models suggest that BALQSOs may be much more common than they appear in the samples. If so, the intrinsic covering fraction of absorbing matter must be relatively large. Numerous consequences follow, including the prediction of a new population of hard X-ray sources (as may have been seen already by ASCA) and a possible explanation for the anomalously strong N V λ1240 lines seen in many high-redshift quasars.
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