Wealth & Money Quote by Mary Hart

Mary Hart is offering a polite justification for celebrity culture that doubles as a defense of her own lane: entertainment journalism as consumer service. The syntax does a lot of work. She starts with budgets and formats - CDs, DVDs, the everyday receipt of pop life - to frame fandom as an economic transaction rather than a guilty pleasure. If you pay, you get access. Not to the person, exactly, but to "a little more", a carefully downsized promise that sounds modest while expanding the mandate for interviews, profiles, and the endless churn of behind-the-scenes content.

The subtext is transactional intimacy: audiences aren't just buying art, they're buying proximity. Hart’s phrasing turns curiosity into entitlement without using the word. "Stars they're paying to see or hear" implies the public has already purchased the right to inquire. It’s a neat rhetorical move because it launders voyeurism into market logic: no prying, just due diligence.

Context matters. Hart came up as a face of glossy, access-driven TV at the height of mass media monoculture, when Entertainment Tonight-style coverage helped manufacture the very idea of the celebrity as a weekly serial. Her quote also captures an inflection point: as media formats multiplied and marketing budgets ballooned, celebrity stopped being a byproduct of fame and became part of the product itself. What works here is the calm tone of inevitability. She doesn’t argue that we should care about stars; she suggests we already paid, and curiosity simply follows the money.