This is an interesting discussion, and it has two prongs:
1) Was the face image downplayed through processing (whether deliberate or not)? and
2) What do you do if you find out a press release was wrong/misleading?
The answer to the second one is easy: you retract it. First, you make absolutely 100% sure you need to retract, because if you do retract then later find out you were right in the first place, you've made things far, far worse. It gets too confusing for people to follow.
This may weaken your argument. Oh well, that's reality for you. We have to take it, lumps and all.
Now, as to the first part: I am not entirely convinced the image was processed in a way as to reduce its "faciness". It doesn't look like a face in either the raw or the processed data. It would be interesting to find out exactly how it was processed, and reproduce it.
Of course I have no idea what the folks at JPL were thinking when they did the processing (I don't know what they were thinking at NASA when they went out of their way to get an image of the landform at all; that was really dumb). I've worked on image processing for years, and making something ready for analysis is very different then prettifying it for a public release. I have no real stake in this issue (since I know that it's not a face), so it would again be interesting to know how it was processed, and why they chose that method. But to be clear, I am unconvinced the processing done made it look less like a face than it would anyway.
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