After a tight first round last week in which Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Satoru Iwata, Rupert Murdoch, and Google’s Sergey Brin & Larry Page went head to head for the title of “The Most Powerful Player Today in Media, Entertainment, & Technology,” the readers responded with resounding support for Murdoch and Jobs.  Advancing them to the final round, take our new poll and tell us what you think.  And if you think neither is worthy of the title, or if you have a strong opinion why you chose one over the other, leave a comment and let us know.  Steve Hawley had the comment of the week last week when he wrote:

“The forces that Murdoch channels are as black as the night, as black as crude oil, the personification of evil. They will continue to do no good in the world.

Disney begat Snow White but remember the old adage "the Mouse has fangs." But that's Eisner's Disney, not Jobs' Disney (as Disney's biggest stockholder). You don't hear much about Apple being evil. Just a closed society. I would be too, if I held some of the world's most coveted intellectual property. Apple has changed the music business by partnering with it. It changed the publishing business 20-plus years ago. It changed movie production. It owns the media player category. It is king of human factors engineering.

If Jobs is Luke, Murdoch is Darth Vader. They are equally powerful and maybe best seen as opposing forces of good and evil. As ambassadors, respectively, of creativity and destruction.

But in the end, I believe that humanity is basically good, which is why I chose Steve Jobs.”