LONDON (Reuters)  BP’s new chief executive said on Monday that its rivals and the media had helped cause a climate of fear during the summer when the oil giant’s blown-out Gulf of Mexico well caused the worst ever oil spill in the United States.

The comments by the chief executive, Bob Dudley, represented the latest volley in BP’s battle to rebuild its battered reputation by taking a harder line with those who had attributed the disaster to a safety culture at BP that, they said, put cost-saving before safety.

In an address to the annual conference of a British business lobbying group, the CBI, Mr. Dudley said there had been “a great rush to judgment by a fair number of observers before the full facts could possibly be known, even from some in our industry.

“I watched graphic projections of oil swirling around the gulf, around Florida, across and around Bermuda to England  these appeared authoritative and inevitable,” he said. “The public fear was everywhere.”