Specialize in spin
If the old adage can be trusted, every cloud has a silver lining. When your group gets hit with a dark cloud, your job is to spin that cloud so the public sees the silver lining. This is a skill and some people are better at it than others but there are a couple of spins that everybody can use.
"This has been a learning experience". If nothing can be done to salvage a horrible mistake made by your company, maybe the best way to spin it is as a learning experience. Every member of the public can relate to learning from ones mistakes and it might be refreshing to see a corporation bite bullet and say "we blew it but we learned how not to blow it again". After you make that kind of a statement, it is best to put some policy in place to ensure that you really don't blow it again. The public is understandably more forgiving the first time you make a mistake than the second time.
