Corbyn can cope with press attacks. He should focus on those who can’t

Tinker, tailor, soldier – oh come on, this is ridiculous. If Jeremy Corbyn is a spy, I’ll eat the novels of John le Carré. There is zero evidence that, as an obscure opposition backbencher light years from the Thatcher inner circle, he even possessed any national secrets, let alone sold them to communists. For the defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, to claim the Labour leader was engaged in a “betrayal of this country” is downright embarrassing. Even the idea that Corbyn was a useful idiot, the old Soviet phrase for westerners duped into promoting communist causes abroad, barely washes; regardless of any sympathies he may have had, he was hardly influential enough in British society at the time to be much use.

True, the fact that a repressive Czechoslovakian regime once considered Corbyn sufficiently sympathetic to be worth approaching is a legitimate story. Readers are entitled to draw their own conclusions. But dragging that one fact out for an entire innuendo-laden week, when everyone from the director of the Czechoslovakian security service archives to former MI6 officers pours scorn on the idea that the approach ever got anywhere, is ridiculous. It’s simply fuelling the disreputable myth that leftwingers are unpatriotic scoundrels who “hate Britain”, as the Daily Mail wrongly said of Ed Miliband’s father five years ago. All it proves is what we’ve always known: that Corbyn’s lifelong distaste for US foreign policy, together with an apparent willingness to overlook the failings of regimes that are not the US, have led to him attracting the attentions of distinctly shady characters at times.

But voters who don’t care about his fondness for Russia Today – essentially a propaganda channel for a regime under which troublesome journalists have a curious habit of ending up dead – or the money he took from Iranian state TV, or his opposition to Nato-led intervention in Kosovo, will hardly care who he drank tea with 30 years ago. This story is ridiculous not just because it’s a smear but because its such an ineffectual one.

Yet the response has been little more edifying; a video for the adoring faithful, in which Corbyn explains how he has been wronged by billionaire tax exiles running the media and warns in a nebulous but faintly ominous-sounding way that “change is coming”.

That’s just a strategy for racking up Facebook shares among committed Labour voters, Murdoch-haters and people who thrill to the idea of shadowy elite conspiracies, not a grownup plan for media reform. And by refusing to elaborate on the nature of that change – whether it’s just about Labour implementing the second phase of the Leveson inquiry as promised in its manifesto, or something broader – he has allowed his opponents to claim Labour is secretly plotting to muzzle a free press. You know, like communists do.

If Corbyn simply meant that, in an age when the under-40s increasingly get their news from social media, the Mail and the Sun and the Telegraph are losing what little power to sway elections they once had, then he’s right. The tectonic plates are shifting, although worryingly the far right has benefited as much as the left from the new platforms opening up.

But such arguments only strengthen the impression that Team Corbyn’s preferred answer to a wildly partisan rightwing old media is a wildly partisan leftwing new media, an army of publishers such as the Canary and Skwawkbox blurring the lines between activism and journalism, until the casualties roughly cancel each other out. That’s not even a solution for Labour, given it was the BBC’s fact-based reporting in general (and arguably Andrew Neil’s in particular) that coolly allowed millions to see the spy story for what it was, let alone a solution for the ordinary citizens trashed in casual drive-by journalism over the years.

And even if this isn’t what Corbyn envisages, threatening some ill-defined change and then refusing to be interviewed about it even by broadcasters is not the tactic of a democratically accountable politician. It’s not even the tactic of someone seeking to build a case for media reform. It’s the tactic of a culture warrior mobilising their supporters.

Because this is what culture wars look like. The point isn’t to persuade or inform but to provoke intense emotional reactions – to rile the other side, and rally your own – and so on the inside they feel like life and death, but from the outside they often look faintly hysterical. They’re the political equivalent of football chants, not arguments. And they’re often a missed opportunity to do something serious.

Corbyn is right: there is something unhealthy about a media in which this silly story could limp on for so long. The same is true, incidentally, of papers unquestioningly regurgitating that wholly unproven story about David Cameron and a pig’s head. There is a calm, reasoned case to be made for a new settlement taking in Leveson’s unfinished business and the things his inquiry never saw coming, from industrial “fake news” farming to the monopoly over information publishing that Facebook and Google are stealthily developing without accepting the responsibilities and costs of publishers. It might usefully include the death of local papers, and the emergence of new local media co-op models such as the Bristol Cable. There is an opportunity both for curbing the excesses of a robust free press and protecting it from cannibalisation by Facebook.

But it should genuinely be about the many not the few; in the national interest, not just Labour’s. The forgotten victims of press misconduct are the people who can’t afford to sue and who don’t have spin doctors; the groups who are unfairly demonised en masse rather than as individuals; and ordinary citizens inadvertently caught up in breaking news stories. (Even journalists who individually do nothing wrong can be terrifying when descending as a pack on, for example, traumatised survivors of terrorist attacks.) Devising comprehensive solutions for all of this is hardly easy; but it would, at least, not be ridiculous.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist