Er, what Phil did is not spin. Spin is lying, plain and simple-- lying by omission. The perpetrators of spin like to believe they're not lying, so they came up with a new word for it, like calling the Estate Tax the Death Tax. It's an emotional appeal that is not based on facts, but is instead based on what the spinner wants the listener to hear. As Thomas Huxley put it, it's beautiful theory spoiled by ugly fact. As Nyquist put it, if you don't do a proper sampling of the data, the resulting answer you get won't be representative of reality (ie, it will be wrong.).

What Phil did was present in the finest Tufte fashion what was wrong with the release. It wasn't spin, it wasn't cherry picking. He said that there was a problem. It was up to management (ie, you, and ultimately your superiors) to decide if Phil's problem is a show-stopper. The existence of the bug is what Phil reported; the delay that that reporting brought about is what you decided. You could have chosen to ignore or marginalize Phil, and that's what a spinner would have done. A spinner would have ignored the ugly fact that spoils what they want to be true and continued straight on ahead, trying to incorporate or subvert Phil's presentation into that narrative.

Don't sell yourself short; spin is what people believe when they are too lazy or too busy to get the facts, and spinners are people who are trying to tell a story so that you won't get the facts.