EVERY morning, as I pick up my phone to look at the news, I wonder who will be outed as an alleged sexual harasser today.

Will it be another American newscaster that I haven’t heard of? Or will it be someone I’ve liked and admired?

Two recent ones were particularly troubling for me.

Firstly, there was John Lasseter, the head of animation at Pixar and Disney, who’s taking a six-month sabbatical after being accused of misconduct with female employees.

Lasseter has directed several of the greatest animated movies of them all, including the first two Toy Story instalments, and been associated with many more. But I think the case bothered me largely because, when my kids were younger, we used to watch the behind-the-scenes bonus features on the Pixar DVDs.

Those little documentaries presented Pixar as the sort of workplace children could dream about one joining. A place where creative people could conjure up all kinds of wildly exciting stories, then work hard to bring them to fruition. It now seems it wasn’t utopia after all.

The second case that disturbed me was that of the author and presenter Garrison Keillor, fired by Minnesota Public Radio after a colleague accused him of inappropriate behaviour.

I’ve liked Keillor’s work since he first started appearing on Radio 4 in the very early 1990s. Though his tales of life in the Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon are sometimes derided as too cosy, he can be a bitingly clever commentator. Almost every one of his books has delighted me, and the inhibited, god-fearing people he writes about remind me a little of some of the older rural Dorset folk I knew when I was small.

Cases like these can leave us confused.

Often, we don’t know what the allegations are. In Keillor’s case, we’ve had his defence (that he did something clumsy, the woman accepted his apology and they remained friendly until her lawyer called), but we haven’t heard the claims against him.

At other times, the words of the person under scrutiny create confusion. John Lasseter talked of “missteps” and apologised to anyone who had been “on the receiving end of an unwanted hug”. But the allegations that have emerged were not about ill-judged hugging, and to describe them that way only spreads misunderstanding and paranoia.

Let’s err on the side of caution and assume that some people caught up in these scandals have been unjustly accused. Unfortunately, that still leaves an awful lot of people in the entertainment businesses that have been doing some truly sleazy and abusive things and getting away with it.

It can’t help but influence the way we think about their work, but it would be wrong to try and erase them from history. It’s understandable that Netflix binned a movie that Kevin Spacey had already made, and that director Ridley Scott replaced him with Christopher Plummer in a film that was ready for release. After all, audiences would have been reluctant to put money into the pockets of a star repeatedly accused of sexual harassment and assault.

But we’ll have to live with the fact that some very significant pieces of art and entertainment have been made by people who have done horrible things.

Amid all these revelations, I admit that I’ve been tempted to doubt a belief I’ve held to all along: that the behaviour we’ve heard about does not represent the way most men think or behave.

However, I do still believe that men are, overwhelmingly, good men. We need to remember that, if we want to raise boys who are confident in their masculinity but respectful of women.

The reality TV star who boasted about sexual harassment and then dismissed it as “locker room talk” was wrong. Most men would not countenance such behaviour, in or out of the locker room.

As it happens, that bragging reality star went on to become president of the United States. Before long, it may be the only job left open to a self-confessed sexual harasser.