HC - you are perfectly correct in that the recent crashes have been from the cruise. However when you look at all the data that is not the case.
There is certainly a little bit of 'playing the numbers' - particularly in companies internal satistics. This is where we generally only use fatilities in these assessments - there is a lot of 'over 3 day injury cases', where the person is allocated an office job to avoid the threshold, or his rota is changed to get him off the platform. Etc, etc.
Accidents from the cruise however are particularly worrying as they typically have a much higher death rate (proportion of the passengers killed) than those which occur during takeoff and landing (successful ditchings aside!).
Which is partially why I have been so interested in the recent gearbox incidents. In all aircraft 'the middle' bit is typically the safest part of the flight - the risks are collision of all types and mechanical failures and sometimes weather related stuff like AF447. The 'end bits' rely upon procedures, facilities, weather, pilots' abilities and the mechanical bits and so are not surprisingly more risky. So when the tradionally 'safer' part of the flight is compromised by design and/or manufacturing and/or maintenance issues the whole thing starts to look a bit shaky.
And so we have accident statistics which for the newer types of aircraft are no better than those they replaced - but the causative factors point much more to design than operation.