Not necessarily. You don't have to say "BUSH BAD OBAMA GOOD" in the article to be biased. You wouldn't even have to lie.
There can be bias in what you choose to report or not report. For example, if high gas prices got more attention in 2008 than in 2012, that could be liberal bias. (Don't know if that's the case, but if it is, it would be bias.)
There can be bias in word choices, like if you refer to a conservative group as "right wing" and a liberal group as "activist" or "watchdog". Switch those and you'd have a conservative bias.
There can be bias in the focus of the coverage. We keep hearing about the falling unemployment rate but not so much about the labor force participation rate. I also remember hearing how bad the economy really was several years ago when the "official" unemployment rate was in the 5-6% range.
I've seen a few "news" articles that claimed Obamacare was the achievement progressives had been seeking since Teddy Roosevelt...now that might be a bad example because it's an out and out lie, but it's still favoring one side over the other.
Left/right isn't the only bias. There's a huge racial bias in national news coverage--missing people only matter if they're young white women. If you got all of your information from your local news, you'd think all black people were violent felons.
Sure, there's any number of small biases. But does that add up to a liberal bias as a whole? On the NBC Nightly News Brian Williams does anti-abortion activism from the anchor desk. Frequently. Is he liberal biased? Does the press take conservative economic claims and analyze them, or repeat them as though fact? A lack of any bias would say "Gingrich claims his tax cuts would create jobs, even though the Bush and Reagan tax cuts never created any jobs in the past." A conservative bias would say "Gingrich claims his tax cuts would create jobs." A liberal bias would say "Gingrich claims his tax cuts would create jobs but in fact will only redistribute wealth and run up the deficits." Or something to that effect.
And therein is the point. There's very very little that the press reports that can be said to be demonstrating a liberal point of view, much less bias. It just isn't findable. The mainstream press is far more neutral in the favor conservative truthiness than it is just neutral.