New questions related to President Joe Biden’s memory and age are legitimate areas to probe, but the reporting should include distinctions between simple gaffes and lapses that are newsworthy, a longtime White House correspondent told the Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellowship class.

“The gaffe thing is not new with Joe Biden, right?” said Darlene Superville of the Associated Press. “I mean, he’s kind of done this all his career, so you also have to keep that in mind, too. But I think just the environment that we’re in makes it more of a story.”

Superville referred to descriptions of Biden contained in a recent report by a Justice Department special counsel who cast the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory” as part of a decision not to prosecute the president for his handling of classified documents.

“Sometimes I can’t remember what I had for lunch two days ago. So, it’s hard; it’s hard. But just given the environment that we’re in… and all the stuff in the special counsel report, so that kind of makes it a story, right?”

“Here’s somebody who wants to be president again,” Superville said. “He’s asking the American people to trust him again for another four years, when they’re seeing all of this stuff go on, and it’s legitimate.”

Superville also discussed the unrelenting demands of a sprawling beat that often makes balancing work with personal time difficult.

“Even though the beat is challenging and there is this kind of lack of balance and encroachment on your personal life, you do have to carve out blocks of time for yourself for things that are important to you,” she said. “And one of the things that I do, or one of the things that I religiously or regularly block out time for is exercise. Everyone needs it. We need a place to put our stress to get it out of our system and also to stay healthy.”

Access the full transcript here.