the upshot of (the) bad information

[Ostap]

"We launched a fear campaign about how AIDS was going to explode into the heterosexual community. Oprah Winfrey summed up what people were hearing when she said, research studies now project one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS by 1990. But that didn't happen, and the upshot of bad information was that in the late 1980s low-risk americans were swamping testing facilities and diverting our attention and energy away from the truly at risk."
link with timecode

Hello, this is from "Real Time with Bill Maher". Why did he not use "the" with "bad information" when he meant the specific fear campaign mentioned above?

 

[probus]

Using the definite article there would have been more precise in meaning. The way Maher put it, there might have been more incorrect info than that referred to by Winfree. It's impossible to be certain whether Maher had a reason for his usage or it was just a slip.

 

[Tdol]

Oprah Winfrey was not the only source of information that turned out to be wrong.

 

[jutfrank]

Hello, this is from "Real Time with Bill Maher". Why did he not use "the" with "bad information" when he meant the specific fear campaign mentioned above?

The simple answer is that he wasn't specifying. The fact that he didn't use an article tells us that. This is very hard for a Russian speaker to grasp, but the best way to understand it I think is the the phrase bad information expresses a general class of information (i.e., a certain kind of information). He's not referring to the specific information that was given but to the fact there were problems resulting from the fact that a certain kind of information was given.

I hope that makes sense.

It's impossible to be certain whether Maher had a reason for his usage or it was just a slip.

It's impossible to be certain about anything but I can be just about as certain as anything that this is not a slip. It's just not the kind of mistake a native speaker makes, it makes perfect sense in the context, and it just doesn't sound like a slip. I'm sure it was written in the script like that.