  Spectropolarimetry of Broad Absorption Line Quasars (BALQSO's) 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
counts distribution is very steep, if the orientations of these two
anisotropies are correlated, optical flux-limited samples would be very
strongly biassed with respect to discovery of BALQSO's. In particular,
currently favored models suggest that BALQSO's may be much more common than in
the samples. If so, the intrinsic covering fraction of absorbing matter must be
relatively large. Numerous consequences follow, including prediction of a new
population of hard X-ray sources (as may have already been seen by ASCA), and a
possible explanation of the anomalously strong NV~1240 lines seen in many high
redshift quasars.
