Peter Taylor, OBE, born in 1942 in Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, is a British journalist and documentary-maker.
Taylor is best known for his coverage of the political and armed conflict in Northern Ireland, widely known as the Troubles, and for his investigation of Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism in the wake of 9/11. He also has a distinguished track record in covering the issue of smoking and health and the politics of tobacco for which he was awarded the WHO Gold Medal for Services to Public Health. He has written books and researched, written and presented television documentaries over a period of more than forty years.
In 2014, Taylor was awarded both a Royal Television Society lifetime achievement award and a BAFTA special award.
Taylor was educated at Scarborough High School for Boys (now known as Graham School), a state boys' grammar school, followed by Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read Classics, Modern History and Social and Political Sciences.
Taylor's career reporting on political violence began with ITV’s This Week in 1967, and continued with BBC TV’s Panorama from 1980 to 2014. His most recent Panorama Special, The Spies Who Fooled the World, investigated the intelligence used to justify the Iraq War. He has made many authored series for BBC1 and BBC2 on the security and intelligence services and five documentary series since the 9/11 attacks on Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism, culminating in his acclaimed The Secret War on Terror to mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 which the Financial Times described as "a small masterpiece of clarity as to our present condition." In 2015, he investigated the funding of ISIS in his programme World's Richest Terror Army.