The case that placed José Luís Ferraz Manso Preto as a defendant in court comes to show the tension that can occur when a journalist decides to keep secret the name of a source in face of the court's demand to know its identity.

The silence of the reporter caused him to suffer a conviction of 11 months on probation, a unique verdict in Portugal since the Carnation's Revolution, and it drawed attention to the frailties of the protection conceded "on the paper" to the journalists' right to keep their sources secret.

Aside all this, we also accompany the unwinding of the Pinto brothers case - the one where Manso Preto testified as a witness -, and we advance some reflections about the validity of the sentence brought against Manso Preto, trying to understand if the verdict was the result of a fair balance of the values at stake or if it tried, above all, to threaten the media as a whole.

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