Bill Zimmerman, former CNN and News 12 anchor, dies at 83

Former CNN and News 12 anchor Bill Zimmerman, a pioneer of both national and local 24-hour news and a Press Club of Long Island Hall of Famer, died Sunday of natural causes at his home in St. James. He was 83.

“He was unbiased. He was honest. And he was a brilliant writer,” said his wife, Dini Zimmerman. “I married the smartest person I ever met. And witty? Hah!”

“He was a newsman to the core,” said his fellow founding anchor at News 12, Melba Tolliver, by phone from her home in Bangor, Pennsylvania. “He didn't dodge questions, he didn't beat around the bush — he was very direct and straightforward. He hated hypocrisy.

"I feel very fortunate to have worked with him at News 12,” she said. “He had a distinguished career in journalism when journalism meant something very different than today.”

Zimmerman — who shared a 1990 New York Emmy Award as anchor of News 12’s coverage of the Avianca Flight 52 crash in Cove Neck — had been hospitalized and in a rehabilitation facility since late 2022 after breaking a hip. Following a series of serious medical issues, “he wanted to come home, and I got him home and took care of him,” Dini Zimmerman said. “He died a week and a half later,” surrounded by family.

A college dropout, he went on to serve as a network-news foreign correspondent and bureau chief, as a CNN anchor and as a founding co-anchor of News 12, the nation's first all-news local cable network.

William Dudley Zimmerman was born April 5, 1940, in Washington, D.C. The second of four children of Rachel, a teacher, and Clarence, a print-machine operator for The Washington Post, Zimmerman attended the now-gone Western High School, whose alumni included Pulitzer Prize-winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, artist Thomas Hart Benton and Gemini and Apollo astronaut Ed White.

He went on to The University of Oklahoma, but “just ran out of money,” his wife said. He eventually earned his bachelor of science degree at age 55, online via Empire State University.

Zimmerman began his journalism career in 1961 at WTVR-TV in Richmond, Virginia. Stints followed at WKBN-TV in Youngstown, Ohio, WHDH-TV in Boston and WTOP-TV in Washington, D.C. He moved to ABC News in 1971, becoming bureau chief in Beirut and in Rome and covering news events from Capetown, South Africa, to Da Nang, Vietnam.

While stationed in Rome, his 1963 marriage to the late Patricia Moore unraveled and he found himself the single father of their four children. “That's why he left ABC” in 1980 for the startup CNN in Atlanta, Dini Zimmerman said. “He had been on the road all the time, and got a job where he could work at one place.”

He and the former Dini Diskin, daughter of ABC News Director of Sports and Special Events Marshal Diskin, married on April 25, 1980, shortly after both were hired by CNN — he as an anchor, she as a director of programming. Famed newsman Sam Donaldson, with whom Bill Zimmerman worked at ABC, told Larry King in 2000 that his colleague was among “some of our best people,” along with fellow CNN founding anchors Bernard Shaw and Don Farmer.

In 1984, when the Long Island cable-TV provider Cablevision created the nightly news program “Cablevisionews,” Zimmerman was named anchor and managing editor. On Dec. 15, 1986, the venture expanded into the 24-hour channel News 12 Long Island, with Zimmerman and Tolliver as founding co-anchors of its prime time show.

In 1995, after having left News 12, Zimmerman unsuccessfully ran as a candidate for Suffolk County’s 12th Legislative District. He founded the production company Bill Zimmerman Communications and taught news literacy at Stony Brook University.

“What impressed me most was Bill's humility” as a teacher, said Howard Schneider, founding dean of the college’s journalism school and a former editor of Newsday. “He never tooted his own horn, even though he certainly had reason to do so, or lament the good old days. Instead he seemed eager to learn from his students.”

An elder of the First Presbyterian Church of Smithtown, he sang in its choir and, said his wife, “always did the voice of God in the Christmas play.”

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters, Cate Rheinwald of Rochester and Heather Kingsbury of Michigan; sons Brad Zimmerman of Georgia and Chris Zimmerman of Virginia; a brother, James Zimmerman, and a sister, Edith Rice; and 11 grandchildren. Another son, Eric, predeceased him. 

Funeral services are private. A memorial service will be held in the spring at the First Presbyterian Church of Smithtown.

Correction: Bill Zimmerman lived in the hamlet of St. James in Smithtown. An earlier version of this obituary had an incorrect village.