It meant real reporting - letting the story tell itself without personal intrusion. I saw it happen. It happened to me. Look into how some people seem to get a lot and some people seem to get a little severance pay when they leave their jobs. A company's severance policy specifies a rate at which moneys will be paid to laid-off regular employees.
Liabilities come up because companies worry about being sued for wrongful termination.
A company therefore has to get a fired employee to sign a waiver, renouncing any claim that he has been wrongfully let go - for example, because he's old. There's a real story in that. You can't ask an employee to waive the right to sue and then not give him something of value for his signature. So severance pay, despite being quantified in a company's employee manual, is just a starting figure. An employee gets extra in exchange for the waiver.